He had grown accustomed to the sight behind the door.
How was this the Dark Lord's bedchamber?
It was nothing short of a madman's fractured dream.
The left side of the room still retained that sinister style that filled the Death Eaters with awe:
Huge black stone pillars, candelabras, eerie green smoke rising from a bubbling cauldron in the corner, and shelves laden with dried human hands and the eyeballs of unknown creatures.
But the right side of the room...
An enormous, jarringly out-of-place white metal table stood there.
There was no parchment on the table, nor any quills. In their place stood rows of glassware gleaming coldly.
Test tubes, beakers, a centrifuge, and a binocular microscope that looked extraordinarily expensive and dizzyingly precise.
And the master of this room, the Dark Lord whose very name terrified the entire wizarding world, was not sitting in his high-backed chair.
His back was to the door. His usual voluminous black robes were gone, replaced by a crisply tailored, dazzlingly white... lab coat.
If not for that pallid skin, one might truly have thought one had stumbled into some Muggle scientist's laboratory.
Lucius, however, was not particularly surprised.
After all, he had procured all of it himself.
"Master..."
Lucius's knees gave way, and he dropped heavily to his knees on the seam in the carpet that divided magic from science, pressing his forehead firmly against the cold floor, not daring to lift it an inch.
"Lucius."
Voldemort's voice came with his back still turned, accompanied by the clear clink of glass.
"You have returned forty-three minutes earlier than I calculated. It seems you have failed!"
Lucius's cold sweat instantly soaked that small patch of carpet.
"Master... please punish me! The operation... the operation was a complete failure!"
He spoke extremely quickly, afraid that